I used to send people small items from Japan as presents, things like candy, small tchotchkes and similar. I've given up on that now. It now costs at least three times the cost of the items in order to send them. I had the bright idea a little while ago that I should send my UK tax return (*) from Belgium to the UK instead of from Japan since I was going to be in Belgium just as I had finished it. It shold be cheaper just going across the Channel, though I... erroneously. It was more expensive to send an A4 document from Belgium to the UK than from Japan!

(*) When I lived in the UK I used to be able to do my taxes online. Since moving to Japan I've not been able to do so because their web based system has a f*cked up interface to their mainframe system that can't process non-UK addresses as the registered address. They flat out refuse to fix it, saying there are other options (pay someone based in the UK to do my taxes or buy and use proprietary software that only runs on Windows).